With the advent of modern communications systems and networks, a multitude of services are provided to subscribers. For example, a given communications user may subscribe to television services via a cable or satellite-based television services provider, wireless and wireline telephone services, wireless and wireline data services, Internet services, and the like. In many cases, some or all of these services are provided to a subscriber by a single services provider.
Due to rapid development of such services by services providers, a given services provider may offer each of such services independently of each other with multiple subscription entry points or services management systems utilizing heterogeneous networks to deliver the services. For example, a wireline telephone services system may purchase or develop a wireless telephone system that operates as a separate operating entity from the wireline services system. The services provider then may develop Internet services and cable or satellite-based television services. Each of these disparate services may be operated separately in terms of services provisioning and management.
In some instances, it is desirable to offer cross product/services provisioning where a single or unified or shared product or service is provided across multiple services systems. For example, in order to provide subscribers of both wireline and wireless telephone services a better voicemail experience, a services provider may wish to provide a “unified” voicemail box to the subscriber wherein both wireline and wireless voicemail messages may be accessed and managed by the subscriber via a single access point. In such a case, a single voicemail box/system may be utilized or two separate voicemail boxes/systems (wireline and wireless) may be linked to act as a single or unified voicemail box. As should be appreciated, a variety of other cross products or cross services provisioning may occur when a service or product is shared or accessed by two or more client systems (e.g., wireline telephone, wireless telephone, television service, Internet services, etc.).
In such situations, a problem often occurs when services management (e.g., creation, update, deletion, etc.) commands are passed to a unified or cross product/services system (e.g. a unified voicemail box) from two or more different service provision systems. For example, an order to change the memory capacity of a unified voicemail box/system, instructions may be passed to the unified voicemail box/system from both a wireline telephone system and from a wireless telephone system. If the instructions from the two disparate systems conflict in any way, changes may be made or provisioned on the receiving device or system that do not provide the services desired or required by the requesting services subscriber. That is, conflicting product/services provisioning changes may be received at a given network or product element (e.g. a voicemail box) that result in a corruption of data or operating instructions at the target element.
Activating, deactivating, updating or otherwise changing products or services across multiple systems often leads to a one to one mapping between order entry interfaces, provisioning systems and network elements needed to provide products or services. Such one to one mapping can result in the duplication of identical services across each of these heterogeneous networks or systems, duplication of back office systems (e.g., order entry systems and portals, billing systems, etc.) to match the provisioning system, and an inability to mediate transactions across multiple systems in the case where the network element is a shared component between two services, such as a shared voicemail box or electronic mail server. Some disadvantages of such a one to one mapping approach include, but are not limited to, forcing additional costs and inefficiencies into the product/service providers due to the overhead of running and maintaining multiple systems that provide similar or same functionalities, hindering product/service providers in offering new service combinations utilizing services that span product/service lines, and creating data integrity issues/problems when multiple provisioning systems access the same network elements.
Thus, a need exists for cross product/service management to provide for managed changes to shared resources (i.e., products and/or services) provided from multiple service product/services provider systems. It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.